![]() A single hinge might have lent it definition – 2020 was a caesura in many lives – but the natural and supernatural go on in parallel, jostling, fogging the atmosphere. ![]() This would be one kind of novel, but halfway in, Covid and George Floyd’s murder irrupt, and change the script. Matters improve she marries Pollux, a fellow indigenous person and a strong-but-sensitive type – then Flora, one of her “most annoying” customers, dies and starts haunting the shop. But, after spending a decade in prison libraries, she’s freed, and hired at Birchbark Books. At rock bottom, she steals a corpse for money, unaware that it’s packed with crack cocaine. We open with Tookie, an indigenous American woman, sunk in alcohol and drugs. Erdrich has grand designs – they’re mostly, but not completely, realised. ![]() ![]() The Sentence is her 17th novel (18th, if you count one that’s co-written): it tries to encompass a range of genres, from supernatural to sociopolitical it’s even set in a Minneapolis bookshop, which our narrator, Tookie, calls “a mission, a work of art, a calling, a sacred craziness”. Louise Erdrich’s faith in the power of fiction is so ardent that it doesn’t always do her good. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |